It would be pretty frustrating to be dumped onto a highway in a stick shift and have to learn how to drive by googling for instructions in the car. That doesn't mean that driving is unnecessarily difficult.

Driving is only intended for people who have been trained and licensed to do so. Similarly, SSL certs are for people who have been trained on how to perform the tasks of a server admin, and presumably have read a 10-page ebook like How To Admin A Web Server.

Web servers in general are never supposed to be touched by the common user. They never were. Your server admin would set up a user account, and you'd dump your files in your ~user/public_html/ folder, and maybe if you were super clever you'd create a .htaccess file. The most complicated task a user ever was supposed to perform was to run "chmod 755" on the files in their /cgi-bin/ folder on their FTP site. All of this worked because an admin had to set everything up the right way and know how to do that.

So the next time you take on a technical hurdle you don't understand, I cannot stress enough how much more useful it is to either look up a good book on how to do it, or ask someone for help. It may not be as instant-gratification, but you'll get what you need done faster and understand it better.